Understanding Style
A black and white image of someone wearing a pair of black sneakers with white soles showing at the top of the photo, they are standing in a puddle looking down at their reflection in the shallow water.
A key component to feeling more comfortable with expressing your most authentic self is to better understand your personal style.
While style has to do with clothing and fashion, it goes much deeper than that. Style is very personal and to have style is to live in alignment, uniting pieces of yourself so yourself and others are able to look at the whole picture. Clothing and fashion is one of the many tools available as an outward expression of that self.
Finding your style is deep work.
To find your style you need to go to your core being.
For this reason alone, self trust is one of the foundational elements of understanding your style. A willingness to be with yourself and allow a more full expression of yourself to show up. Self trust and the willingness to look inward go hand in hand. It is much easier to avoid looking within, for fear of what you may find. It is much easier to instead look out there for the answers, after all, there are so many shiny distractions. Yet, that is exactly what you need to stop doing, you need to stop looking out there.
You need to start looking inward. It can be daunting. For these reasons, a lot of people avoid it.
Understanding your style is about understanding yourself.
When we don’t want to face ourselves we look externally, perhaps we try and buy something to fill the void. The thrill quickly wears off and we don’t know why we even bought it. We soon discover that it doesn’t work for one reason or another. To put it bluntly, this is often because we don’t know who we are and we don’t know ourselves very well because we are not willing to look inwards and face ourselves.
When you practice introspection, you gain a deeper understanding of why you choose what you choose and that helps you make faster and more informed decisions in the future. This is because you are weighing it against what you already know about yourself.
When you understand yourself better you make purchasing decisions that better match your personal style. You shop much more intentionally and buy way less stuff.
Style is a manner of doing things.
How we move about the world, the actions we take from day to day, creates the reality of who we are and in turn how we are perceived by others. The lives we have created for ourselves is based on our own internal perceptions and what we believe is possible. Therefore, how we do things indicates our style.
For example, if you are very thoughtful and have a tendency to notice details that others often miss, you are going to carry yourself in a way that allows you to see such details around you. You are also going to speak in a way that conveys those details, be it to yourself or others. You are also going to care about the details on your clothing, because they mean something to you. Yet, there are many other people who simply do not see details (and nuance) the way you do and therefore details on clothing make no difference to them.
When we understand who we are and what we represent in the world we are better equipped to make clothing choices aligned with that. When we do this it is easier to get dressed every day and our clothing is used as a handy dandy communication tool.
To truly understand your style you need to take a holistic view of who you are and how you show up in the world. I’ll share my holistic process in a future blog but for now practice taking a step back from time to time to look at the bigger picture of who you are and how you show up. This will help you consider things you may have never considered before.
Finding your style is one of the most fun and memorable things you can ever do for yourself.
When it comes to consuming (clothing or otherwise) it’s so much easier to go buy something new that feels good for a fleeting moment. Sooooo much easier… than facing ourselves and the pieces of ourselves we are less than happy with. Buying more stuff we don’t need without giving much thought to if it actually works for us. It’s a vicious loop.
When you take the time and invest in the experience of understanding your personal style, magic happens and not just in your closet. It can really set you up to show up in a way that helps you move forward in life in a way that is super supportive and nurturing. I know it’s ‘just clothes’ but there is a bigger context here that often gets missed because we are caught up in the need to just buy something to solve a problem. As I said, style goes much deeper and when we give ourselves permission to dig a little we often find gold.
